OPINION:
In 2015, The New York Times reported a disturbing remark the deployed Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. made to his father about hearing Afghan police officers sexually abuse young boys and being told, when he tried to get his own Marine officers to help intervene, to ignore the screams “because it’s their culture.”
Because it’s the Afghan “culture” for adult males to molest and rape and sexually exploit little boys.
Well, make way for that culture, America. Because it’s coming here. Slowly but surely, the idea of men having sex with little boys is seeping its way into the mainstream.
Look at this, from LifeSiteNews, a headline that blares, “11-year-old ’drag kid’ dances in popular NYC gay club as patrons toss money at him.”
The news outlet goes on to report how “the pre-adolescent boy, dressed in drag to imitate singer Gwen Stefani, pranced around the stage [just recently] at Brooklyn’s 3 Dollar Bill, an LGBT bar described as ’queer-owned & operated’ … The disturbing event was first reported by Yosef Ozia of Ozia Media in a YouTube video, which was in turn reported by Milo Yiannopoulos’s Dangerous website. Desmond Napoles, who goes by the drag stage name ’Desmond Is Amazing,’ is barely 11 years old, yet homosexual and mainstream media have thrust him into the spotlight as the face of the growing prepubescent gay/transgender movement.”
Video of the boy prancing and dancing for dollars handed him by grown men in the crowd isn’t just shocking. It’s sick and twisted.
Yet “Good Morning America” on ABC “recently devoted a segment to the boy during which his cross-dressing was celebrated as an example of individuality, and his parents were praised for their support of his drag hobby,” LifeSiteNews reported.
Eleven-year-old boys don’t have drag hobbies. They have parents who don’t properly protect and who toss what’s supposed to be their prized priorities — their children — to the predatory clutches of child molesters.
And when the media applauds such sickness, the path of America’s culture leads right to the door of Afghanistan.
From The New York Times in September of 2015: “’In his last phone call home, Lance Cpt. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base. ’At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,’ the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. ’My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.’ “
Well, how does something so horrific move from the category of horrific to accepted “culture” in the first place?
Piece by piece. Bit by bit. Little by little.
Until one day, the rape of little boys by grown men simply becomes a lifestyle choice. A fringe lifestyle choice, maybe. But a lifestyle choice, just the same.
That’s the culture collapsing moment.
Again, from The New York Times: “Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan. … The practice is called bacha bazi, literally ’boy play,’ and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases.”
Admittedly, a little boy dressed as a girl and dancing on a stage at a gay bar in New York City is not the same as a national culture that tolerates, accepts, even embraces, “boy play.” It’s not the same as grown men raping young boys.
But it is a step down this road.
It is a chink in the moral compass.
And if America doesn’t watch it, the time will come when we’ll look back on the story of an 11-year-old boy dressed in drag and dancing suggestively before a crowd of lust-filled men who are tossing dollar bills onto the stage — and shrug.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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